Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

From the World of Entertainment

(Reprinted from the issue of February 12, 2004)

Oops, I did it again. A couple of years ago I dozed off late in the seventh and perhaps most exciting game in World Series history. Last week I dozed off in the fourth quarter of what I later gathered was the most dramatic Super Bowl ever. Even as a couch potato, I’m over the hill.

What’s more, I left the room during the halftime show, which got more coverage than the game itself. Entertainment was provided by a lot of raunchy rock singers, as you’ve no doubt heard (or seen for yourself), and culminated in the baring of part of Janet Jackson’s bosom.

The uproar was astounding. CBS stammered apologies, but nobody was buying excuses. For once, conservative Christian America made its outrage at the media felt. Sending this filth into our homes — in prime time! during the Super Bowl! — was just too much. Even the White House felt compelled to deplore the incident.

Maybe Janet Jackson was jealous of the publicity her brother Michael’s curious behavior has been receiving. At any rate, she was lucky Vince Lombardi wasn’t there. That old lion, a devout Catholic, would have made short work of anyone who defiled football, which really replaced baseball as the national pastime when he led the Green Bay Packers to victory in the first Super Bowl 38 years ago.

What possessed CBS to let these naughty kids perform without adult supervision? Football is oddly linked to American piety: A notable ratio of its players are devout Christians who pray unabashedly before, during, and after games. Families watch it together. Unlike baseball and basketball, it offers little scandal, and still puts a premium on character. It didn’t need a dose of brazen indecency at one of its peak moments. The latest Jackson stunt, after all, was hardly unforeseeable. The young woman has appeared topless on magazine covers in the past. Demure isn’t quite the word for her.
 
Missing the Point

Meanwhile, another controversy rages on in the entertainment world. Never mind the Jackson family: Jewish groups continue to rage against Mel Gibson’s new film, now titled The Passion of the Christ, due for release on Ash Wednesday.

So far the film has been screened only for a few selected audiences (I was privileged to be included in one). But a few leaders of Jewish organizations — including Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League — did attend a screening, and they don’t like what they saw.

Foxman, who recently published yet another book on “the new anti-Semitism,” has now written an attack on the film for New York’s Daily News, charging that it “unambiguously portrays Jews as being responsible for the death of Jesus.”

Well, not exactly. It shows Christ (a Jew) being brutally tortured and killed by gleefully cruel Romans (non-Jews), albeit at the urging of Jewish authorities, as the Gospels relate (and what other record is there?). He is also comforted by His (Jewish) Mother and deserted by His (Jewish) disciples, as a mob (Jewish) screams for His crucifixion.

Does Foxman have another version of the story? Even if we suppose the Gospels are fictions, they can be called anti-Jewish only if only the Jewish authorities and the mob count as Jews. But of course the Gospels are the best (and almost sole) early testimony we have of these events, in which most of the characters were Jews.

Foxman doesn’t even contest their accuracy. He merely wants some of their facts excised, particularly what he calls the mob’s “blood curse” at Matt. 27:25. And he wants Gibson to add to the film “a postscript with him coming on the screen at the end to implore his viewers not to let the film turn some toward a passion of hate.”

Ah, the perfect ending! Gibson should in effect declare, at the end of this stunning, amazing film, that it could be interpreted as anti-Semitic, but that he hopes it won’t produce hatred of Jews! Not only would that insult the film and its Christian audience, not to mention the Gospels; it would produce the kind of ill feeling that Foxman says he wants to avoid. Not “hate,” but justified resentment at the intrusive presumption of those like Foxman. Gibson ends the film with the Resurrection, but Foxman thinks he’s come up with a better conclusion.

If you think Janet Jackson upstaged the Super Bowl, wait till you see what Abe Foxman wants to do to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In a film about Good Friday, he wants contemporary Jewish interests to upstage the eternal theme of the redemption.

In fact, Foxman’s reaction exaggerates the role of the guilty Jews in the film. Christian viewers will see them almost as minor characters as the Romans do the dirty work, which is almost unbearable to watch. The Jews don’t wield the whips or pound the nails. But thanks to the outcry against the film, the guilty Jews will get more attention than they otherwise would have. Many viewers may see Caiaphas and the raging crowd and think of Foxman and the ADL.

For years we’ve been told that eminent Christian authors from Chaucer to T.S. Eliot are anti-Semitic; as well as several Popes; and Martin Luther, and the Church fathers, and yes, the authors of the Gospels and St. Paul. In fact Jewish writers like Charles Krauthammer speak of “2,000 years of Christian anti-Semitism.” Are they leaving anyone out?

Why don’t they blame Christ Himself? He antagonized the Jewish authorities of His day and started a religion many modern Jews consider “anti-Semitic.”

So why spare Christ, who started it all? Is it really credible that Christianity is a religion of love and forgiveness, if immediately after His life His followers abandoned His teachings and adopted inveterate hate against those they blamed for His death?

“For nearly 2,000 years,” writes Foxman, “Jews have been the victims of persecutions and pogroms fueled by the age-old canard that Jews bear responsibility for the death of Jesus for all time.” And he says that this same canard is “unambiguously” the point of The Passion of the Christ.

He’s wrong. Certainly nobody at the screening I attended took it that way, nor have the many other Christians who have actually seen it. Viewers typically sit in awed silence after watching it, and I can’t fathom any other response. To say it’s about “the Jews” is as far beside the point as saying it’s about the Roman Empire’s penal system. This is taking ethnocentrism to the verge of lunacy.

Gibson captures a rich tableau of secondary figures in the drama — we see the treachery and despair of Judas, the pompous malice of Caiaphas, the half-conscientious dithering of Pilate, the terror, confusion, and shame of Peter, the agonized tenderness of Mary — but there is never any doubt about who the main character is. Abe Foxman has seen the film, and he still doesn’t grasp that it centers on Jesus Christ and nobody else.


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Joseph Sobran